


Bedside Manner

by ThrillingDetectiveTales



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cat School (The Witcher), F/F, Witcher!Yennefer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:00:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28431303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales
Summary: After running afoul of a garkain in the Redanian countryside, celebrated witcher Yennefer, the Black Cat of Vengerberg, wakes up in a familiar bedroom.
Relationships: Triss Merigold/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 8
Kudos: 26
Collections: fandomtrees





	Bedside Manner

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silverfoxflower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverfoxflower/gifts).



> Happy holidays to you, silverfoxflower!
> 
> This is my first time writing in Witcher fandom and as such it's a bit of a hodgepodge of Witcher 3 and Netflix show details. I stuck with the latter for Triss's looks, but put her in Novigrad per the Witcher 3 rather than Temeria. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy it!

Yennefer lay still and silent for a moment after she’d swum back to consciousness, taking careful stock of first her body and then what details of her surroundings she could piece together without alerting any potential watchers to her wakefulness.

There was a hot throb in her side when she breathed — an injury she couldn’t place — and her head ached with the faint, steady pulse that meant she’d been exposed to a high saturation of toxins. Poison, maybe, or an unexpected pocket of noxious gas, or perhaps she’d tangled with something venomous. Her last clear memory was of cresting a hill a half day’s ride out of Novigrad to investigate a series of recent disappearances and discovering a dilapidated farmstead squatting in a low field that had long since given way to scrubby marshland. Just the sort of slowly rotting shelter to play happy host to any number of vermin.

Wherever Yennefer was now, it certainly didn’t feel like the slow, seeping damp of the Redanian countryside. Too warm, for one, and the air was thick with the crisp vegetal bite of rosemary and the citric tang of lemon over sweet burning cedar. As if on cue, there came the loud hiss and pop of a settling log.

There were other sounds, too. The arrhythmic scratching of a quill on parchment and the distant clop and rattle of carriages on cobblestones. Somebody was humming — absent, thoughtful, and tuneless.

Yennefer opened her eyes.

She appeared to be cocooned in the relative privacy of a familiar mahogany four-poster. She was propped up on a small mound of decorative pillows that had been piled against the headboard and the bed curtains had been half-drawn, silk threading and beadwork glittering in the burnished light off the nearby fire. Yennefer groaned and pushed up onto her elbows. 

“Don’t get up,” a voice admonished her. “You’ll pull your stitches if you try to do it yourself.”

Yennefer turned her head, vision swimming slightly at the edges, to peer at the wingback armchair posted catty-corner to the fire.

Triss Merigold was sitting there with her feet tucked underneath her, curls spilling down her shoulder in a glossy wave as she looked back and forth between a massive tome open across her lap and a scrap of paper she had balanced on the armrest alongside a glass well of ink. She had a goose feather quill between two of her fingers, both spotted with dark flecks, and a grey smudge on her jaw where she must have rested her chin in her hand at some point.

“Mistress Merigold,” Yennefer greeted with a fond groan as she sank back into the pillows. “Fancy meeting you here.” She smiled at the soft, amused huff of laughter that slipped free of Triss’s pink mouth and closed her eyes again.

“Yes,” Triss agreed, with a teasing lilt. “How patently strange that you should find me here in my own home, in the city where I’ve lived for the better part of two decades.”

Yennefer hummed her agreement and made to shift to a more comfortable position, sucking a sharp breath through her teeth at the lance of pain that erupted along her left flank. She wormed her hand under the sheets and pressed her palm against her side, unsurprised to feel the soft cotton of a neat, practiced wound dressing.

“I told you not to move,” Triss reprimanded. There came the soft _thunk_ of a book closing and then the creak of floorboards bending beneath the weight of a body in motion.

Yennefer squinted as Triss leaned over the mattress. “I believe your specific instruction was that I not attempt to get up without aid.”

Triss spared a second to roll her eyes and then drew the linen sheet down to Yennefer’s waist, tilting her head and ducking in close for a better view of the bandages. Yennefer realized belatedly that she was bare but for the dressing and the bedclothes, not that she was particularly concerned with preserving her modesty. It was nothing Triss hadn’t seen before.

The sorceress in question stroked her fingers along a seam where one strip of cloth crossed over another and murmured, “If you’re already feeling well enough to resort to pedantry, I expect you’ll be back on your feet by the end of week.” She pressed gingerly at the lowest rung of Yennefer’s ribs, making a soft sound of apology when Yennefer hissed. “No spotting and nothing seems broken.”

“What happened?”

Triss sighed and straightened up, wiping her palms together and then resting her fists on her hips. “A garkain tried to take a bite out of you,” she said, cocking her head to one side and arching a single speaking eyebrow over her dark eyes. “Or so I was led to believe by the city guardsmen who delivered you to my doorstep, bloodied and unconscious and roasting with fever.”

“Ah.” Yennefer vaguely remembered the fetid heat of the monster’s breath rolling down her neck, wet and unexpected and far too close.

“Quite,” Triss agreed, mouth pursed with a taut sternness that belied some small measure of amusement. “You’re lucky your reputation precedes you,” she continued, turning toward the low table at the center of the room, where a filigreed ceramic pitcher was sitting next to a pair of matching cups. “No country hedge witch or marketplace charlatan was willing to risk treatment on behalf of the Black Cat of Vengerberg, and so Destiny brought you here to me, instead.” She raised the pitcher and poured, returning to Yennefer’s side with a teacup of crisp spring water, kept cool through some minor exertion of magic. “Here. Drink. I’ve no doubt you’re dehydrated.”

She helped guide Yennefer up into a proper seated position and handed her the teacup. Yennefer made a low sound of gratitude and drained that glass, then another, and another still, until Triss rolled her eyes again and deposited the pitcher none too gently in Yennefer’s lap.

“I am curious,” Triss said, leaning against the bedpost while Yennefer tipped her head back and drank deeply, without a thought for decorum, “as to how a lesser vampire was able to get the drop on you.”

Yennefer gulped her way through the last dregs of water and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Poor preparation,” she admitted, half gasping with relief. “It surprised me. As my intention was simple reconnaissance, I had no potions brewed and my silver blade had been dulled courtesy a pack of foglets a little way up the road.”

“That seems uncharacteristically shoddy of you. A little vampire oil, at least - ”

“Yes, well,” Yennefer interrupted in an agitated snap, “I don’t generally keep dog tallow on hand, and there was hardly time to go collecting.” Pain was licking through her side in time with her pulse, and even after downing a bellyful of water, her mouth felt fuzzy and her head ached.

“You could have come here first.” Triss’s gaze was dark and intent under her furrowed brow, her soft mouth curved down into a shallow, disappointed arc. “You know my stores are always open to you, and that I would gladly equip you with any tincture or potion your heart desired.”

Yennefer wrenched her gaze away, studying the delicate, dancing blossoms painted in watery brushstrokes across the fine ceramic of the pitcher as she rocked it carefully between her palms.

“I was - ” she considered for a moment and gritted, “ - not entirely confident as to my welcome, after the last time I was here.”

“Because we slept together?”

Yennefer darted a glance at Triss from the corner of her eye and was surprised to discover that she looked just as incredulous as she sounded.

“Honestly,” Triss scoffed, shaking her head so hard her riotous curls bounced around her shoulders. She turned to pace a few feet toward the fireplace and then came stalking back again, chin raised. “You’re worse than Geralt.”

 _“Nobody’s_ worse than Geralt,” Yennefer protested, out of habit. She didn’t cross paths with the other witcher often, but the stubborn self-reliance he clung to well past the point of personal detriment was the stuff of legend.

“Please,” Triss snorted, dropping down onto the mattress heavily enough that Yennefer yelped as she was jostled suddenly to one side. Triss’s hand found her knee, over the bedclothes. She gave it an apologetic squeeze and dragged her palm up Yennefer’s thigh. “You’re cut from the same cloth, right down to your very stitching.” She slipped her hand under the linen sheet, curling her fingers over the hard blade of bone at Yennefer's hip, and Yennefer shivered at the warmth of Triss’s skin against her own.

She reached down and took Triss’s wrist gently in hand, holding her there as she swept her thumb in soft, careful strokes over the faint beat of Triss’s pulse where it drummed beneath her skin. “I’ve been run out of more beds in my not inconsiderable lifetime - ” she started, and then sighed and shook her head, mouth twisting into a bitter little coil of amusement.

Triss hummed and shuffled a little closer, so that Yennefer’s bent leg was pressed in a warm line along her side from knee to calf. “Allow me to be exceedingly clear,” she said, and waited until Yennefer looked up and caught her eye to continue. “However many beds you may have found yourself fleeing in days past, you will always find welcome in mine.”

Yennefer’s throat, already sore, felt very thick and tight. She dipped her head in a shallow nod. “I shall endeavor to keep that in mind.”

The noncommittal response was not, it seemed, enough for Triss, who sighed through her nose and shook her head, giving Yennefer a sharp, pointed squeeze. She leaned in, so near that Yennefer could almost taste the faint perfume rising off her skin, saccharine and floral.

“Yennefer,” Triss said, dark eyes hooded and luminous in the toasted glow of the dancing flames. “Next time? Come here first.”

“Alright,” Yennefer huffed, mouth curling despite her best efforts to maintain a front of irritation. "Fine.” 

It sounded in the small, quiet room like a promise of something else altogether.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
